Apps, who has covered the inquiry daily, alternates these narrative chapters with a forensic examination of how building regulations and corporate safety standards have been watered down since Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation bonanza. Almost exactly two years ago, just after the cross examinations with the insulation companies, I wrote about how the Inquiry had revealed a construction industry devoid of morality or ethics. I wrote optimistically about how architects might form part of a solution: custodians of a new set of values that can run through every stage of a project. Grenfell was not an accident, but a foretold and carefully planned tragedy, built up for decades. It was prepared through a series of decisions and political or economic games, aiming to maximize profit, thus setting the value of human life below the importance of financial interest. Peter Apps provides a multilateral understanding of the events leading up to the Grenfell disaster, through the revelation of the multitude of factors that led up to it. Show Me the Bodies is littered with accounts of incidents like these. Why did fire doors fail? Why was there no plan to evacuate disabled residents? Why did the building’s smoke control system malfunction? For every one, Apps provides a clear explanation. The explanation is always, in the end, that the people in charge were not interested in the input, and consequently in the lives, of the residents of the tower. They were only interested in costs.

An] essential read for everyone… [Apps’] coverage has been unmatched and he kept our attention on the astonishing revelations with compassion and persistence… Apps’ book brings together all he learnt through his detailed reporting from the trial. It is passionate and precise and admirably concise given the complexity of what he covers… It’s difficult to imagine a more informed or passionate summary than this book provides and I encourage everyone to read it.’ I bought this book because I read a review essay which mentioned it in tandem with another book ("The New Life," by Tom Crewe, coincidentally with a very similar cover-colour scheme, also waiting beside my bed now), and although I of course knew about the Grenfell Tower disaster I did not know what to expect. You would think that a book about fire safety standards, planning permissions, social housing management and so forth would be dry and hard to warm to; not this book. This book gets its hooks into you more or less instantly and doesn't let go until you're done. It's not merely a literary accomplishment -- it is also the sort of cautionary tale which ought to be read and absorbed by anyone responsible for risk assessment in housing, anyone responsible for urban planning or city management or fire department policy...the lessons Apps draws are so widely applicable that I cannot but describe this book as an extremely important contribution. It doesn't escape me that it is almost certain that none of the constituents who might benefit from it will read it -- here in the US because it's "not local and therefore irrelevant," in the UK because, well, "that's not the way we do things." Show Me the Bodies" becomes tear jerking without being meretricious; the narration of a plethora of stories, deriving both from survivors and bereaved families, is scaringly pragmatic and revealing, without the addition of melodramatic elements. The narration's truthfulness aids to increase the awareness concerning the systematic mechanism failures that orchestrated the fire's extent.The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to 'stay put'. Many did and they died. It was a disaster decades in the making. The easy villain of the piece is Brian Martin, who failed to take action on woefully inadequate cladding safety regulation. His name comes up again and again, including during a bizarre exchange when he asserts that a former fireman with a commitment to higher standards being placed in charge of certain regulations would “bankrupt” the country and that “we would all starve to death.” But Apps rejects Brian Martin’s claim, made at the inquiry, to being a “single point of failure” in his department; clearly, this was not the case. Show Me the Bodies is committed to documenting what happened, eschewing easy narratives that detract attention from the structural causes of the Grenfell tragedy. Martin, in Apps’s account, gets neither damnation nor absolution, although it is clear which he deserves. Cladding alone didn’t cause the Grenfell Tower tragedy. The tower also had non-compliant lifts, a malfunctioning smoke control system and gas pipes which punched holes in the compartmentation at every floor.”

The book’s title, Show Me the Bodies, is taken from remarks said to have been made by Brian Martin, the civil servant responsible for fire safety guidance at the privatised national research laboratory, BRE, to justify not tightening up regulations in response to a series of devastating fires at home and abroad, including Lakanal House in Southwark in 2009 in which six people had perished. The received wisdom, on which decades’ worth of increasingly threadbare regulation and oversight relied, was that flat fires didn’t spread to other flats, and so high-rise residents were always instructed to “stay put” in the event of an emergency. The introduction of combustible insulation and cladding in flat regeneration programmes made that advice lethal. Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did, with the story of a Grenfell resident struggling to escape with his young daughters and heavily pregnant wife. Those who justified the deregulating policies that led to this misery sometimes spoke of the interests of “UK plc”. But, even if you put basic humanity aside, how is it good business to create the situation we now have, where billions have to be spent correcting mistakes that should never have been made?Social murder is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. A crime commited through active decisions made by political, social and business leaders that leads to the deaths of others. At their heart lies the watering down of building regulations, begun in earnest by Margaret Thatcher 30 years earlier, happily continued by Tony Blair and accelerated by David Cameron, who in a New Year’s Day speech in 2010 brazenly vowed to “wage war against the excessive health and safety culture for good” on behalf of “UK plc”. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The book is structured chronologically, taking us through the night of the fire minute by minute. As this timeline progresses, Apps explains the choices that lead to each failure. Why were the first firefighters who reached the tower delayed in getting to the fire? It was because of issues with the system used to override the elevators, which was more complex than necessary. The more complex system was chosen “because of a perceived risk of anti-social behaviour”; there were fears a simpler system might be misused. “Prejudice against social housing residents appears to have actively undermined the safety features of the building,” Apps writes. Prejudice against social housing residents appears to have actively undermined the safety features of the building.

In 2010, a new Conservative government came in with a new prime minister, David Cameron, promising to “wage war” on what he termed “health and safety culture.” A “ one-in, one-out” policy on new regulations was brought in; this was subsequently increased to “one-in, two-out .” Low standards got lower. It would not be Cameron and his “ Notting Hill set” that paid the price, nor any of the West London oligarchs or the upper-class types who spring to mind when the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is mentioned. But it would, in one of the most starkly unequal places in the UK, be their neighbors: the residents of Grenfell, who were not rich and mostly not white. It’s difficult to imagine a more informed or passionate summary than this book provides and I encourage everyone to read it. Then, if you teach, add it your students’ reading list, if you work in an office, lend it to your colleagues. The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to 'stay put'. Many did - and they died. Instead, flames escaped through a gap between the wall and a poorly fitted window and ignited the cladding. Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. His coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London. Our 2023 judging panel, chaired by Martha Lane Fox, said:You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Author has done a fantastic job of outlining accounts of some that made it out and others that didnt, while interspersed throughout are facts that were already in public domain prior to grenfell, along with others that were kept under wraps by various parties, but primarily the cladding suppliers of the products which weren't safe for use on such a tower under the conditions used. And with only ourselves and South Korea allowing these items on, surely it would have occurred to somebody that it's not a great idea. COINCIDING with last week’s closing of the 300-day inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire comes the publication of a damning and moving account of the events leading up to the entirely preventable disaster that claimed 72 lives, 17 of them children. A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned. The 30-year pursuit of deregulation in the building industry demonstrably contributed to the killing of 72 people in their homes. It helped lead to the moment when a two-year-old boy died coughing and crying in his mother’s arms while she was on her phone to a firefighter, shortly before she too died. The sections of the book that recount the night itself are moving and devastating. They are told through the experiences of the people involved: some of whom survived it and many who didn’t. They put a human context to the tragedy: the lives, loves, challenges, dreams of those who died or whose lives were changed forever by what happened.